This Is The Secret Ingredient For The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

Finding the perfect chocolate chip cookie has been my Holy Grail for years now. (I highly recommend this as a personal quest/hobby—the taste testing is always fun, even less-than-ideal cookies are usually still pretty delicious.)

When I was growing up in the 1980s, chocolate chip cookies tended to fall into two categories: crispy-crunchy, or soft-chewy. Today, there’s a type of cookie for everyone: you can bake them in a skillet, use browned butter, try fancy flours or mix-ins, bang the baking pan on the countertop, let the dough rest overnight, finish the cookies with flaky salt, and the list goes on and on.

I’ve come very close to finding my favorite cookie at restaurants and bakeries, and even with pre-made dough, but baking them from scratch is another story. In my own kitchen, I’ve never been able to nail that perfect balance: crispy-chewy edges, tender-chewy centers, and just the right amount of chocolate throughout. But last year, I tried a new technique that produced the best batch I’ve ever made.

Smitten Kitchen, one of my all-time favorite recipe sites, has several recipes for chocolate chip cookies, and each one is slightly different. Deb Perelmen, the creator of the site, seems to share my obsession with these treats. Skimming her recipe for Salted Chocolate Chunk Cookies, I noticed that it calls for turbinado sugar (also known as Sugar in the Raw) in addition to the usual granulated and brown sugars. Deb writes, “You can use more brown or white [sugar] if you don’t have this, but the subtle crunch it adds is delightful.”

Turbinado sugar, also known as raw sugar, has crystals that are coarser and darker than granulated or brown sugar. Turbinado sugar maintains its light caramel flavor and brown-blonde color because of the light processing.

Normally, I’m not one to buy a single-use ingredient, but I was intrigued by the idea. So I picked up a bag of the sugar at the grocery store and used it in place of half of the granulated sugar in this basic recipe. And she was right—instead of melting into the dough, the coarse brown sugar added a hint of texture that did make each bite truly more delightful. It seemed to enhance the flavor too. For a relatively simple recipe, these cookies tasted like they came from a bakery.

Try this ingredient swap with your next batch. This trick works with any chocolate chip cookie recipe, whether it’s the fancied-up kind, or back-of-the-bag classic.